Choice
by LuvEwan
Summary: One mother keeps her child, another gives her away. One post.


Choice

by LuvEwan

Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me.

_One mother keeps her child, another gives hers to the Jedi._

_--_

One of the first things Qui-Gon Jinn told his apprentice was that missions could rarely be categorized as successes or failures. An assignment began and it ended---a Jedi could only be content with the knowledge that every effort was exhausted for the good of the Republic, the Force.

Still, he couldn't help but feel that they had wasted their time on Tehanna. The newborn was indeed luminous in the Force. A natural choice for the Temple. But at the last moment, the mother dashed forward with a cry, wrenching her child from the Master's arms.

I can't. I'm sorry I'm sorry for sending you all the way here sir but I just can't. He's my only baby my only baby.

Obi-Wan had looked away from the breathless panic on the young woman's face. He stared at his boots and the stained carpeting until Qui-Gon touched him lightly on the arm, and he knew it was time to go.

But the woman stopped them again, made them wait for dinner. They sat on a half-collapsed sofa while she moved back and forth, the baby pressed to her breast and her hair curled by sweat.

A hand-stitched blanket lay over the sofa arm. He wondered if the woman had made it, sitting in this house, when her belly was still full with child. He glanced at the baby again. Would anyone ever tell the boy, when he was older, that he had very nearly become a Jedi?

She emerged from the small kitchen with two containers. "There's a little meat, but mostly potatoes. I usually have vegetables but the ones we grow have come out rotten lately."

Qui-Gon accepted the offering with a smile. "This is more than enough. We'll be grateful of it during our journey."

She nodded. The baby was asleep on her shoulder.

--

"This was a long way to go for potatoes, Master."

"I've gone twice as far for a glass of lukewarm water and a glare, Obi-Wan."

--

Tehanna was water and trees and brown grass. The next boat out to the capitol was a flat boat, a barge. The bunks were full underneath; the Jedi were given blankets to sleep on the deck.

--

Obi-Wan had spent a good deal of his life on ships heading somewhere, dozed through hyperspace jumps, but the movement of the barge was a relentless drone in his head. His dreams were disoriented, his body always aware of the water, and he woke with his neck cricked and the taste of the potatoes in the corners of his mouth. He watched the sky, black and featureless like the river.

He had not been an only child. He knew he had a brother. Perhaps that was the difference.

He felt his Master move beside him. "You are the only Padawan I've known who wakes early to brood. A baby is hard to part with. We cannot fault her decision."

"I know, Master. I don't."

"Good." Qui-Gon murmured, the heaviness of unfinished sleep in his voice.

Obi-Wan tried to settle, but the wood beneath him smelled wet, stale. He shifted. "Do you think that if.....if the baby had a brother or sister, the mother would have been able to give him to the Jedi?"

"I can't claim to know the answer to that, Padawan."

Obi-Wan nodded, though he knew his Master could not see him in the perfect darkness. "It makes me wonder...why my own mother was able to let me go."

Qui-Gon paused. A mild wind roused the trees. "She allowed you to live your life with others who share your gifts. She allowed you to realize your potential.

"We cannot say that she cared for you any less than the mother of the child in that house."

His mother was the barest film of a memory, an impression or a feeling in the back of his head. Not enough to account for the thickness in his throat. Before today, he had not thought of her for a long while.

--

He must have fallen asleep, because he felt a hand on his shoulder, then his stomach--Qui-Gon pulling him back into the blankets. He realized blearily that he had rolled halfway towards the water, and mumbled "sorry" to his Master. Qui-Gon covered them both up again without opening his eyes.

Obi-Wan shivered and Qui-Gon turned onto his side, letting his arm drape across the younger man.

"Sometimes I think I could not let you go," Qui-Gon said quietly.

--


End file.
